Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday July 21, 2008 @12:30PM
from the august-came-early-this-year dept.

jcatcw writes "Quick, incremental updates, along with heavy user involvement, are key characteristics of the emerging software development methods championed by a new generation of Web 2.0 start-ups. A survey conducted for Computerworld showed that an overwhelming majority of the respondents said that traditional corporate development teams could benefit from Web 2.0 techniques, specifically the incremental feature releases, quick user feedback loops and quality assurance programs that include users. Fifty seven percent of the respondents said problem-solving and analytical skills will be key requirements for next generation developers. The bottom-line: corporate development teams need to get to know their users."

And is instead similar to the Agile software development process. If the average Web 2.0 monkey had some real software engineering background, maybe their work will be maintainable a few years down the road, and not just rewritten for the Next Big Buzzword.

It's unfortunate that you were moderated a 'troll', when it's obvious that you're correct on this. Agile methods predated Web 2.0, and it's tragic that the latter movement is somehow getting credit, in this article, for the former. What's next? Is Web 2.0 going to get credit for OO?

I've heard described the difference between "Agile" and "agile". The lowercase "agile" merely refers to the goal of embracing change with software development without losing efficacy. This is a good goal, regardless of how you do it. The uppercase "Agile" always refers to someone's attempted implementation of the former, and is generally a disaster and/or sham. This description is consistent with what I've seen so far.

This has nothing to do with Web 2.0 and is instead similar to the Agile software development process.

Yes and no. It's true that the Agile people had this pretty well figured out well before the Web 2.0 wave.

However, part of the reason that Agile methods have so much uptake is that the Web 2.0 companies are releasing early and often, both showing that it can be done and forcing their competitors to step up the pace. I also give some credit to the Rails people, who built a framework that supports key Agile practices like unit testing and short feedback loops.

Sadly, you're absolutely correct. We've got a Web team here that's all into 2.0 and Ruby and the latest fad language/tool. The funny thing is that these guys don't seem to know anything about Web 1.0. They're totally clueless about the HTTP protocol and will say silly things like you can't have ampersands or periods in URLs. RFC? What's an RFC?

It doesn't help matters that they're Linux fans (I'm an old school UNIX admin/systems programmer and see nothing compelling about Linux; sue me). I swear, it

I think this has more to do with the free man-hours devs get from users testing amd troubleshooting their products, then anything else, really.

That's definitely one source of benefit. And generally, people are happy to give it. There are a variety of beta-quality products I use, and am glad to give early feedback because it helps me get a product more in line with what I want. When I don't have the time to deal with beta-quality stuff, I pay up for a finished product.

From a developer perspective, I love this, too. You never really know what people are going to do with something until you give it to them. If you're Microsoft, you'll sit there pilin

I disagree. I think agile development (not web 2.0 - whatever that is) is really a useful methodology. Rather than developing the product for an extensive period of time and finally confronting the customer with what you've cooked up, you periodically show them what you've made and let them provide input on future directions. As a customer, I would like that. I can see progress is being made, and I can spot early if things are going in a direction I don't like.

The biggest disadvantage to agile that I see is that, if you have lots of customers (think MS Word, or slightly more niche, Solaris OS), you can't really get feedback from all of them (and even if you could they want different things). Also, you can't really release a new version of an OS frequently -- customers hate even planned downtime and are often running versions that are 5 years old because it works and there's risk in trying something new.

The biggest disadvantage to agile that I see is that, if you have lots of customers (think MS Word, or slightly more niche, Solaris OS), you can't really get feedback from all of them (and even if you could they want different things).

If you have a lot of customers, you don't need to get feedback from them all. Instead, you have product managers who give feedback to the development team based on a variety of inputs, including customer research, user testing, interaction with user groups, user surveys, and competitive analysis.

For feedback on stuff under development, the interaction design world has plenty of tools for figuring out what sub-groups you need to test your software on and how to do that effectively.

The only thing different I saw was that Wesabe has no QA staff and lets its users and CEO do the testing. What the article didn't mention was this was probably due to lack of financing to actually hire a SQ team rather than preferring to run a software company w/o QA.

Agile, "extreme", and other iterative development models go back more than 10 years... that's just when Extreme Programming was the buzzword and made it big. It's pretty much always been a waterfall vs. spiral world in software project planning.

And none of it has anything whatsoever to do with web 2.0.

Getting things in front of users fast is key to user acceptance. However, it has to be managed well. Users often don't actually know their requirements, and everyone has emotions and priorities that are disproportionately represented relative to their actual value. You can really easily end up chasing your own tail or always being behind the ball because you're always reacting instead of acting.

You can really easily end up chasing your own tail or always being behind the ball because you're always reacting instead of acting.

Too true. However, I'd argue that a well-managed agile process can give you more initiative. There's nothing quite like coding up a feature, putting it before the product development people, and getting feedback, all within a workday.

As you say, though, it has to be well managed, with a strong project manager who can step on behalf of the developers when the product development folks ask for features that would be prohibitively costly or time consuming to implement.

I'm not impressed with the "perpetual beta" and "using your users for Q/A" concept. Remember, the users can leave.

I've seen this happen with Tribe. [tribe.com] Tribe was a nice little social networking system for people in the San Francisco area. Then, in 2007, they went "Web 2.0", with a system that let you "customize your home page".

At first, this drove the users nuts, as they tried to find a home page layout that would work. "Tribe.net bug reports" became the most popular forum. After a while, most users got their home page to some format that would work (the default was awful) and didn't have overlapping panes, then stopped using the new, fancy features. Users began to leave; some users even set up a competing system in disgust.
As more users left, Tribe tried to charge for some features. More users left.

Tribe is now down to two employees and a fraction of its user base of two years ago.

One should make a distinction between software intended for general use outside of a corporate setting and software intended for use in corporate backrooms. Agile development only works when the users are invested in the software. So you're 100% right about the former case: general users aren't usually invested enough in a piece of software to stick around and help out the developers by providing usability comments and such. People get paid to do that in corporate dev shops - why does anyone think general users will do that for free?

On the other hand, user involvement and management involvement are critical to internal corporate software development. User involvement is needed to properly understand the business cases and provide usability feedback, and management involvement is needed to make overall feature decisions with an eye on keeping down costs and enhancing efficiency. Agile development helps deliver software that addresses business issues at a low cost.

As a professional developer, the main risk is that internal users will come up with a feature request only to have it watered down or rejected by management in order to keep development costs down. Then the users are unhappy with me, I'm unhappy with the managers, and I end up providing a "most-of-the-way-there" product that satisfies no one fully, but keeps savings flowing into senior management wallets. (Management can force the users to use the software, at least until someone board member's brother-in-law sells us an alternate solution.)

But I tend to favor the Agile Development process in that case too because about the only leverage I have is the fact that I've involved the users and managers at every step, documented the software as well as the decisions, and a have trail of accepted release candidates.

I'm not impressed with the "perpetual beta" and "using your users for Q/A" concept. Remember, the users can leave.

The upside is that if you do it right, they're more involved than ever. Google was in beta for years, as was Flickr. I was fine with that; being an early adopter and watching the product evolve was exciting, especially when they did something in response to user feedback.

This approach really isn't feasible in certain markets, even though I can agree it would help. For instance, my company develops health care diagnostic solutions, some of which are heavily regulated. While many of our tools and products could highly benefit from this design approach, federal regulations simply make it an impossibility.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that many other markets are regulated in a similar fashion that prevents this.

For instance, my company develops health care diagnostic solutions, some of which are heavily regulated. While many of our tools and products could highly benefit from this design approach, federal regulations simply make it an impossibility.

You'd be surprised. There are a number of medical device people who are active in the Agile world. Yes, you can't push new code to somebody's pacemaker every morning, so there are some limits. But they are definitely applying Agile lessons even in heavily regulated spaces, so it's worth checking them out.

At the same time, some of the lessons of Agile development may still be of use to. For example, the Agile method advocates heavy use of unit and integration tests to establish a baseline for current behavior and to catch regressions. This attitude towards automated testing is useful no matter which industry one is in.

Very few web/2.0 apps are open source, and while this makes a nice buzzword it hides the truth: the real revolution in software development, still not practiced in many corporates, is the competitive, open, standards based approach used by open source teams.

You cannot do "incremental releases" to products used in critical systems (the risk is too high) but you can make the technology transparent, easy to understand, easy to contribute to, and based on clear standards.

In my experiences with developing and using web 2.0 apps I have found that there is a lot of problems with useless information.

The perfect example of this is Slashdot, even with the moderation system it is still full of useless, off topic, biased, and jaded information. This isn't to bash Slashdot, it is far and above one of the best communities around.

The problem with using Web 2.0 is how much work it is. If you require registration than you will have to maintain logins, and if you don't you have to deal

I really don't think the article is saying "we should do intranets like web 2.0 websites! and have all user generated content!"

They are simply saying, Instead of say having an internal software dev project, and having a huge design timeframe, huge development time frame, and then 3 months for test/fix/ship, the project should be built incrementally, using the same techniques as a lot of web 2.0 startups use...

release early, release often, work with the users, incorporating their feedback quickly into the project. Instead of doing 1-2 years of design, 1 year of dev, then releasing a beta that no one can use, solves no ones problems, and in general was a complete waste.

Instead, start prototyping early, releasing things to users or a group of users, and building the software iteratively with them instead of saying "this is what we built, learn how to use it" say "help us build this so it solves your problems in the best way possible"

And it's good to remember that nothing of this has anything to do with Web 2.0:)

I think the one tie is that before Web 2.0 a lot of people would hear about these approaches and say "unpossible!" Now that you can point to plenty of successes that work like this, people can't be as casually dismissive.

I think the one tie is that before Web 2.0 a lot of people would hear about these approaches and say "unpossible!" Now that you can point to plenty of successes that work like this, people can't be as casually dismissive.

Perhaps. But, another equally likely scenario is that this sort of fast development cycle was impossible back then. Many of the tools and languages advocated by Agile proponents and Web 2.0 startups have only come into prominence over the last few years. One of the most important things for Agile development is thorough, robust tool support. Its much more difficult to do Agile/Web 2.0 development without IDEs, unit testing frameworks, and version control/configuration management. As these tools have ca

But, another equally likely scenario is that this sort of fast development cycle was impossible back then. Many of the tools and languages advocated by Agile proponents and Web 2.0 startups have only come into prominence over the last few years. One of the most important things for Agile development is thorough, robust tool support.

As you can see from my comments elsewhere in this thread, I think the new tools have made uptake easier. But the tools aren't particularly important; good Agile teams existed long before the modern tools. Indeed, they were only invented because of those Agile teams. Even if you took away my refactoring tools and my unit test frameworks, I'd still be releasing early and often; my productivity would just be lower.

Bad SNR on Slashdot? You must have a very low tolerance for noise in that case.

On a typical article of 200-300 posts you get maybe 5-10 useless ones (1. frist psot 2. goatsex suxors 3. turd in the library 4. racist junk for the sake of racism 5. some redundant posts giving the same wikipaedia link 6 times withint one minute)

That's pretty much it, unless you consider ideas you disagree with to be noise (in which case you should remember that there is no "-1, I Disagree" moderation option)

You forgot the lame jokes, the followups by people explaining it was a joke, the followups by people who didn't realize it was a joke and try to repeat it, the complaints about the editors, the complaints about the moderators, the dupe/oldnews posts, and the people who didn't read the article and comment on something unrelated.

We need to deliver world-class e-tailers, aggregate bleeding-edge channels while growing our virtual bandwidth and benchmarking one-to-one deliverables. That is not to say that we redefine dot-com experiences and maximize B2C web services all the while revolutionizing end-to-end mindshare and monetize front-end deliverables.

...is often no better than literary mumbo-jumbo. Like this article mentioned in XKCD, where the creator of deconstruction (a literary method) describes why he created it:

This type of device may have enabled me to detect not only in the history of philosophy and in the related socio-historical totality, but also in what are alleged to be sciences and in so-called post-philosophical discourses that figure among the most modern (in linguistics, in anthropology, in psychoanalysis), to detect in these an evaluat

The concept of hot mashes makes sense, but a lot of web apps are based on browser screen scrapes with forms handling parsers and forms retrieval. When you add layers on top, it's possible to both mangle data and mis-represent what's going on in the back end. Translation: a layer of disconnect with potentials for

Agree; 9/10 of the developers I know have no problem solving skills. Got so frustrated in one code review recently I yelled at the guy "Didn't you take the same courses I did?" We graduated compsci together. He was using floats for UIDs, arrays/iterative searches for keyed lookups, and violating encapsulation at every turn. Algorithms, data structures, complexity, and OOP 101 were foreign concepts.

I happen to be knee-deep in Agile development in a corporate environment, as a lowly junior developer. The teams are definitely meeting every day and it is hyper-collaborative in that respect but user involvement is still handled by marketing and trickles down to R&D at a slowly and ambiguously. I see this as our weak point. The slow pace could be a positive so that we don't spin out of control, but the quality of information we get is where things are most dangerous, imho.
I imagine a start-up would be small enough to include developers in the customer-collaboration process.

user involvement is still handled by marketing and trickles down to R&D at a slowly and ambiguously. I see this as our weak point.

You're right; that is a common mistake.

In my view, Agile development is all about making feedback loops effective and fast. Even if you're releasing software regularly, that isn't enough; you have to see how it's affecting the users. Maybe that means developers are directly involved and maybe not, but you should certainly be sitting within easy conversational distance of somebody who does spend a lot of time studying your users.

In short, you're right: going faster doesn't help if you don't look where it's g

They had Marketing handling the beta at my last job. Which is one of the reasons that I'm not there anymore.

Seriously, on what planet is this a good idea? The ability of the average Marketing drone to communicate even the highest level information regarding a problem (for example, 'the website is down' when there's really just a typo on the homepage) is dangerously poor.

It seems to me that agile development is the key to bypassing Marketing altogether. Once the clients start realizing "Hey, we can tell t

I hate the bombardment of updates I have to run now. Windows, Adobe, some install manager, Adobe, Java, Abobe... You get the idea.

But the reality is that this "agile" stuff only makes sense if you are improving the product. I don't want to install 38 updates to get acrobat 8.1.4 and get nothing (read: improved or added features) in return! Make the product stable for 6 fscking months! Also don't realease a major update every year!

So companies that like to sell software based on 12-18 month releases will never move to a true "agile" development... that would mean upgrading features and basic functionality without the end user paying for it... GASP!

I hate the bombardment of updates I have to run now. Windows, Adobe, some install manager, Adobe, Java, Abobe... You get the idea.

Well, I'd more call this "Agile done stupid". It's possible to make automatic update processes pretty much seamless from the user's perspective. That some companies aren't good at paying attention to what the user actually wants is a problem that predates Agile methods.

So companies that like to sell software based on 12-18 month releases will never move to a true "agile" development...

I don't think that's necessarily the case. The excellent Java IDE has release and early-access versions. The release version costs money and has a new version every year or so. The early-access version is free, beta quality, comes out frequen

I am so happy I found Debian. Upgrade your whole system with a single command. And if you run stable, you don't even get newer versions of software - you just get (backported) security fixes. Once it works, it just keeps working. It's almost a pity that a certain release will only be supported for a number of years...

But the reality is that this "agile" stuff only makes sense if you are improving the product. I don't want to install 38 updates to get acrobat 8.1.4 and get nothing (read: improved or added features) in return!

Some people consider quality and reliability to be features. There is a reason why BMW is perceived to be a better brand than say GM and the reason is not because the BMW has power windows and traction control while the comparable GM vehicle lacks these features. Just because a feature doesn't have high visibility doesn't mean that it isn't there.

So companies that like to sell software based on 12-18 month releases will never move to a true "agile" development... that would mean upgrading features and basic functionality without the end user paying for it... GASP!

So they charge for a subscription. There are already companies which do this.

I'll assume you're not trolling here. If you find you're ever kicking off all your users to deploy an update, you're doing it wrong. Session persistence is supported by most useful production servers. This can be used to share sessions among nodes of a very small cluster (even two instances of the server running on one machine) or simply save the sessions to disk and restore them after restarting the system. With a little forethought regarding backward compatibility, you won't have any problems. And yo

And with all of these little incremental updates, how do you not kick all of your users off of the system repeatedly? Sit around and wait for everyone to log off?

Depends on your technology, but by and large you build things in such a way that you can shift load around without people noticing. In web-land, that's generally done with load balancer tricks when upgrading the front end, and a smart service layer when upgrading back-end apps.

"problem-solving and analytical skills will be key requirements for next generation developers"
Are they kidding me? Since when was this requirement "new"?
The problem that will confront your typical corporate development environment will be the same problems that have *always* confronted large bureaucratically heavy development environments. The list starts with the fact that the shear size of such environments makes it near impossible for them to be agile. That is why most great new stuff comes from

Incremental change is all fine and dandy, but it can still end up as a pile of crap unless the whole team understands what the "vision" is.

Faced with a billion emails from customers all suggesting different and often conflicting things, people on the team with their own hobby horses and pet projects, and countless other influences along the way, you need to ask "Why? How does this help us become a ?"

This type of development actually works quite well in some cases. My group is contracting for a large company, and are developing/maintaining an internal website for different parts of the company. We often go to the customers themselves and see what they want. We develop something, have them test it, and request changes, upon which we implement right away.

The whole system works quite well. The major hurdle usually comes around when management gets involved. They want to see change requests and hold pointless meetings and shift people around, etc. Because we are contractors, we can usually bypass management and the system works rather well.

Exactly. We do this for an internal app in the company, too. What you absolutely need (and why it works well for internal stuff, IMHO) is someone from the dev team who is there for the users. Someone who knows their jobs, talks to them, helps them with bugs (absolutely critical: if you do quick incremental updates, you need to take the occasional pain of bugs off the users shoulders quickly), explains to them what this is all about, and so on. A gardener for users, so to speak.It works fantastic for us.

I wish all this was true. Incremental and fast and includes clients. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. Sorry but I really have not seen development teams using such methods successfully.

Works for me. It requires supporting disciplines, though. In my view, that includes a well-meshed team, a very disciplined product management process, strong automated testing, a relentless devotion to code quality, and continual examination of your architectural choices.

It also works for plenty of other people. Flickr released every few hours, and they ended up selling for $20m after 18 months of work. YouTube releases once a week for interface changes and once a month for database changes, and they always have. At a billion views a day, I'd call them pretty successful.

How does this work in regulated industries like insurance where changes affecting pricing and eligibility require filing updates to the manual with each state's Department of Insurance?

Good question. Maybe somebody who does that kind of work can speak up, but here's my take:

My first move would be to put a bunch of unit and acceptance tests around pricing and eligibility code. If we know we can't accidentally trigger a regulatory refiling, then we could change the system in other ways fearlessly.

Once you know you can't break things accidentally, then it seems like you could throw the question back in the laps of the guys in suits. If they request a change that requires re-filing everything

My first move would be to put a bunch of unit and acceptance tests around pricing and eligibility code. If we know we can't accidentally trigger a regulatory refiling, then we could change the system in other ways fearlessly.

Wishful thinking, perhaps? You can never make any change completely fearlessly in most projects. Unit tests can do a lot to help increase your confidence and catch bugs early, but they are not a substitute for knowing what you're doing and understanding its implications, and neither are they foolproof.

For one thing, it's impossible to get 100% test coverage for most projects. If you don't have full coverage, you can always break something in a gap.

Wishful thinking, perhaps? You can never make any change completely fearlessly in most projects. Unit tests can do a lot to help increase your confidence and catch bugs early, but they are not a substitute for knowing what you're doing and understanding its implications, and neither are they foolproof.

Well, I did also say acceptance tests, which I think are also very valuable. I never suggested that they were a substitute for knowing what you're doing. It's true that they aren't foolproof; maybe it's just me, but I discourage hiring fools.

For one thing, it's impossible to get 100% test coverage for most projects. If you don't have full coverage, you can always break something in a gap.

This is true. From talking to people who do insurance company work, the kind of bug rates you can get get from doing unit and acceptance testing are already worlds better than what they are used to, and it may be enough for their environment. If not, there are other pra

For what it's worth, I think pretty much everything you wrote there is reasonable. I just wish you'd allowed for it more clearly in your previous post. While you may be aware of the realistic limitations of unit testing and you may take other steps to compensate, there are a lot of people around who think unit testing really is a silver bullet, and will stubbornly maintain that if they have unit tests they can basically do whatever they want and still be safe. I believe it is best to discourage such narrow

Totally reasonable thing to worry about. Maybe I'm still stuck too much in the past here, but the problem that still worries me more is the people who don't have good unit and acceptance test coverage. On the other hand, if a team were prone to Silver Bullet Syndrome, then perhaps their unit tests wouldn't be what I'd call good anyhow. Could you say more about what you've seen in the field that worries you?

My evidence is purely anecdotal, from various roles mentoring/training junior developers, helping out on forums for CS students, and the like. I have noticed a distinct trend in recent years for some of them to tell me point blank that unit tests make arbitrary changes safe (with no caveats or disclaimers given or, probably, assumed).

Usually, the people who do this are more enthusiastic than average. As a consequence, they tend to read books like Working Effectively With Legacy Code or some of the XP advoca

One thing that comes to mind is that most of the agile leaders I've met are pretty sharp, and the technical ones are generally top notch, with many years of experience. The initial audience they were addressing is people like them, so a lot of the literature is could well be poorly tuned for the fresh-out-of-college set.

Will you be at Agile 2008? If so, drop me an email and we'll meet up for a beer.

Regardless, you should present on this very topic at Agile 2009. We specifically want critical fee

I'm flattered by your comments, but I'm afraid I'm not even remotely qualified to present at a conference, particularly not one on Agile ideas. I wish you luck, though. It's a bit far from the UK to come for a visit, so have a beer for me while you're there.:-)

I understand, but you should definitely think about it.

Almost all of the presenters are people working in the field; few are full-time "experts". And by definition, the "Questioning Agile" is meant to draw in outside views. If you're already mentoring junior developers and can present to 20-30 people, then I'm sure you're as qualified as the average presenter. The rest is preparation, and the year until Agile 2009 gives you plenty of time to develop your thesis, to collect evidence of the problem, and to de

It gets even better. "Fifty seven percent of the respondents said that problem-solving and analytical skills will be key requirements for next generation developers." Heh, so then the other about 43% believe that you can be a developer/programmer _without_ problem-solving and analytical skills? And, wait, it's supposed to be a new and web-2.0 thing that now a whole 57% see a need for those skills? I.e., that previously even _more_ PHB's thought that any drooling retard is just as fit to be hastily drafted i

Was worried by that survey myself. So I went hunting for the actual survey article. Sounds like they were picking one of several "most important" skills. I would guess(hope) the other 43% chose other options because either they already have a steady supply of developers with problem-solving skills, or they're respondents who are proficient in those other skills hoping for a job.

Well, I'm still not impressed. So basically:

- "18% cited the need to work with online communities"... as more important than analyt

"Incremental, fast and includes clients" certainly has the risk of scope creep, but with proper change management, that can be mitigated. The benefit, however, is transparency. You don't get the developers going off and wasting lots of time building the wrong thing. You don't get a continual state of development where it's never production-ready. The end effect is that it breeds a culture where you get used to delivering production-quality code. It sounds pathetic, but that's actually a rare skill. T

I've found this only works if you have a client who doesn't want to force you into a fixed bid contract.

After a lot of years developing software, I have never even heard of a fixed bid software job where everybody ended up happy. Every one I have seen up close has ended up with at least one side feeling like they got screwed, and generally both sides feel that way.

The good news is that there are other options. This book [poppendieck.com] has some great options for software development contracts that work in an Agile context.

I wish all this was true. Incremental and fast and includes clients. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. Sorry but I really have not seen development teams using such methods successfully.

...you need to couple it with EFFECTIVE and relevant feedback from the development team to the customers, testers, and users.

It is not enough to just acknowledge the feedback from your users, rather you need to make them an integral part of the process and SHOW that their opinions count.

Developing software can no longer be dictated from the "top" by decree or from the feedback of small subsets of your user base. And contrary to your assertions, this approach has been very successful in both of the start